


Summing Up The Ass Fleet Liveblog

by imahira



Category: Glass no Kantai | Glass Fleet
Genre: Criticism, Essays, Gen, Meta, Originally Posted on Tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-24
Updated: 2015-10-20
Packaged: 2020-05-07 11:00:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19208017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imahira/pseuds/imahira
Summary: This was not a favorable evaluation but it's probably the most thought anyone's ever put into Glass Fleet, so I'll archive it here (posted mid-2019)





	1. Chapter 1

MY LIFE IS A JOKE AND I AM A MEMBER OF THE GLASS FLEET FANDOM

 

all right, summing up the Glass Fleet experience:

If Tytania is Legend of the Galactic Heroes, but shitty, then Glass Fleet is Tytania, but shitty.

I will say this: I have never actually overdosed on an anime before  ~~BECAUSE OF RACHEL~~

the most glaring things:

The combat choreography sucks. It just sucks. I can barely parse battle strategy, but I noticed this, because it was just awful. In Glass Fleet you duel by repeating the same thrust until somebody trips. Spaceship combat consists of standing still and firing straight ahead until it’s time to ram your spaceship into the other guys.

Cleo barely qualifies as a character. He does some things, but he leaves no impression at all. Michel would have made a far better main character instead of being sidelined to him.

Michel’s interest in Cleo: Why? Why? It’s implied that he has…charisma? strategic skills? We don’t see any of that. Ultimately he displays more interest in Vetti than in her. But they have sex and I guess are in love? Because…they…are a man and a woman who knew each other for a while.

Jfc fuck Vetti. Fuck his tasteless, disgusting backstory, fuck his hogging half the screentime for a character arc that climaxes with a magical 180 degree personality switch, fuck…whatever the hell he’s dying from? What the hell was even happening? What  _is_  soleil? Why does it power spaceships and also you can stick it in your body to keep yourself alive? When did that even happen to him and Cleo? They were both severely injured and needed drastic healing prior to the start of the plot, but the show never saw fit to show us what happened? What the fuck?

The side characters are vaguely charming. They’re basically one dimensional but whatever, they’re cute. (Why, though, does Eimer get an ENTIRE episode of flashback that brings the story to a complete halt?)

The prisoners who are introduced as attempted gang rapists, and then become the comic relief. They become bff with their would-be victim. They didn’t die soon enough.

Remember the episode where Michel meets a man who looks just like her dead brother, and he tries to kill her, and then she has to choose between saving him and Cleo, and he floats away into the black hole, and it turns out it really was him the whole time but he’d been brainwashed somehow, but she never finds that out? The writers sure didn’t because it’s never mentioned again, despite numerous flashbacks and references to the real Michel!

Also, that weirdass moment where Cleo implies that Michel/Racine was in love with her brother…!?!?!? Cleo, just because  _you_  want to fuck your brother…

Ralph. He has no personality. None. He’s just edging on yandere for Vetti. Vetti’s relationship with him is the closest thing we get to some kind of humanizing trait for Vetti. And Ralph is 8. Or, I don’t know, 11 at the most. We never actually see any sexual contact, but Ralph does proposition him and get shot down (this is played for laughs). Kids don’t act like that unless they  _are_  being sexually abused. God damn I hated this kid. But he did deserve better. Like, say, some kind of personality aside from being Obsessed with the man who’s molesting him.

My favorite part was when Rachel kills him, and then Vetti is like, “Where’s Ralph? Somebody send him up here.” And then that’s it for the whole episode until Rachel says, “He went away to find himself!” and Vetti goes, “WHAT DID YOU DO TO RALPH” and then that’s it. The conversation ends. He’s never mentioned again. All right. Great work.

Rachel. Holy shit. Rachel. Wow.

Why introduce a character, make a huge deal over the fact that she is seeking ~the truth~ and has nothing but contempt for Vetti but is trapped in a political engagement with him, set up a conflict between both of those things and her devout belief in her father’s religion/desire to “save” the people of the galaxy…and then she finds out Vetti is even more of an awful person than she thought, but agrees to marry him for the good of the galaxy. Then the next time we see her she’s madly in love with him. WHY? The only affection he ever shows her, she KNOWS he’s faking it. He stops trying entirely after the marriage, but NOW she falls in love with him? After he’s admitted to rape and murder and manhandled her while doing it? Now that she gets a front row seat to the fact that he’s blatantly, obviously molesting a child? She sees him “invite” Michel into a private room, they disappear and next morning Michel is running out of his room, obviously distressed–and she gets jealous. O-fucking-kay, Glass Fleet.

And then she just goes cuckoo because she’s a hysterical woman who’s soooo jealous over this awful, awful man who has given her not the slightest reason to care about him or even believe his goal for the galaxy is something worth attaining. Whatever. She killed that annoying fucking kid and became the Pope. Good for her.

Like 5 different characters are mortally wounded in the final battle and they have their dying moments or whatever but then don’t die. Okay.

There’s maybe some commentary on religion? Possibly? The pope is corrupt and the religion itself is this creeping book-destroying enemy of free thought, and all the true believers are a little cuckoo and believe the black hole is going to save them through destroying them. And they drive into it and all die at the end. Except it turns out that everybody in the galaxy in fact  _was_  supposed to go into the black hole (because the galaxy was dying and the ancients had this plan, etc.). The religious people just didn’t have this one specific mystical item that no one anywhere actually knew about, so really they did the right thing, but they were dumb because they shouldn’t have done it. OKAY???? Kind of sucks for them!

Also, we find out that Pope Rubberchickens doesn’t really believe in the precepts of his religion, but Rachel does…so, he raised her with the intention of using her as a political pawn, but encouraged her to believe all this stuff, which would actually make her  _harder_  to control? He does seem to care about her to a certain extent and tries to let her in on his plan except, surprise, she’s a little put out that he wants to stay in this galaxy and be rich. He’s not very good at this whole scheming thing, is he?

Many of the “good” supporting characters are also very religious, but, for example, they believe that planets are unholy and landing on them is sinful. So they’re forced to land on a planet and are comically upset because they think their souls have been tarnished. IDK I’m, like, 110% atheist and…that’s not very funny? They seem quite upset? Also, if they’re that serious about their faith, why don’t any of the “good” characters believe in the Cross Star religion to the point of wanting to go into the black hole? I mean…that’s like the entire basis of the religion. They don’t seem to be very good at this whole thing either.

The show ends with Cleo dying and giving his heart to Vetti in some golden glowing afterlife and they have merged into one being and now Cleveotti knows that he just wanted to LOVE somebody the whole time, so he gets to rule over the…..new……….galaxy? Planet? They went through the black hole because when Cleovetti merged it fulfilled a prophecy and everybody was protected by a giant glass Christmas tree ornament and now they’re…? Uh……………yeah, whatever.

Glass Fleet is a show that is set on a galactic scale, but space has oxygen, atmosphere, and gravity. There doesn’t appear to be a star, and the planets aren’t actually planets. They’re landmasses that float around randomly. Fire burns in space, smoke billows upwards, rainbows appear, people play harmonicas on the roof of their spaceship. There’s a black hole at the edge of the galaxy with another galaxy inside it. It’s mostly used to dispose of dead bodies.

The titular “fleet” is introduced in the next-to-last episode and gets blown up about five minutes later, and a character comments that the ships, after which the entire show was named, were substandard because they were produced too hastily.

Final point: a glass battleship. A glass battleship whose finishing move is diving through the enemy ship so it explodes. A glass battleship.

Glass Fleet.


	2. Part 2: Gender Issues

part 2 of my exhaustive evaluation of the terrible anime glass fleet: gender issues edition

To its credit, Glass Fleet does show a number of competent, capable women. B.B., Eimer and Sylua are all good at what they do. The representative of the women’s corp of the People’s Army is fun, in the two or three scenes she’s given. There’s that doctor too, who has some personality before Vetti absorbs her into his orbit of bullshit. There’s definitely an entire episode where the bulk of plot development is thanks to the female characters.

However, four of those characters have no arc to speak of. Eimer gets a short arc where she’s in love with Cleo but nothing comes of it and then Nowy is in love with her, but despite an entire episode of flashback we really don’t see much change in her.

Michel should have been the foil for Vetti instead of being demoted to…tritagonist? Is that the word? Yes it is. She also gets a short arc where she’s possibly raped or possibly not–it’s not clear if Vetti went through with it (because he’s an evil gay man and she has boobs), but as far as she knows she was. She’s certainly traumatized. And…she recovers from it, I guess. She punches a mirror and is about to kill herself when she remembers something Cleo said (barf) and then decides life is worth living. If I had to pick a low point for the show that episode and a half stretch would be it.

Anyway, uh….honestly Michel is a pretty good character, she was just so wasted I really can’t even think of anything. There was a more interesting plot thread dangled early on where Cleo accused her of being more interested in her pride as a noble than in any genuine sympathy for “the people”. But that was dropped, so, uh, what does she learn? That Cleo was great? I don’t know.

Oh, yeah, she’s possibly trans or nonbinary, but that isn’t really delved into. (I believe she does still think of herself as a woman, so I’ll use “she”.) She lives as a man, passes up the chance to wear dresses and when she and Cleo have sex she covers her breasts rather uncomfortably. However she does live in a world with very strict definitions of gender roles, or……that’s what her father says in the flashback but actually there are other women who fight with swords and that isn’t really commented on. Maybe that’s just for nobles? Maybe this show kind of sucks?

Anyway there’s the issue of the concept of gender changing over time, and the issue of filtering that through the fictionalized structure of “she HAD to assume this specific male identity!” and the issue of that not even being adequately explained. She used to like dresses and dolls, and then her brother taught her sword stuff and she, like, absorbed his personality into her own in an unhealthy way, and then he died and she had to assume his identity…. Yeah, I don’t know.

And so we come to Rachel. Rachel, Rachel, Rachel.

Rachel.

I’ve never, in my entire career of exposure to media, seen a show flush a female character down the toilet so dramatically.

I mentioned how she was set up in my previous post. And I want to emphasize that I’m not opposed to tragic character arcs on principle. If she hadn’t lived up to that potential for any well-explored reason, I could have accepted that. If there had been a single reason for her to fall in love with Vetti–okay. Not every character has to change positively.

But, no, she just instantly, off-screen, abandons every trace of personality she had in favor of mooning around over him for no reason. I mean, I started watching this show because I heard it was bad. I wasn’t expecting much. But she is set up so well. She could have carried half the story–the entire story, even–on her own. I wanted a terrible viewing experience and she knocked me off my moorings and I got emotionally invested and watched 8 episodes in a single day and got a terrible headache.

Rachel, more than the entire rest of the show put together, deserved better. And then she spends the second half of the show wandering around in low-cut nightgowns trying to have sex with Vetti, getting tossed between this ludicrous affection for him and a vague blind faith in her father’s religion before she loses her grip on reality, kills a kid, kills her father and then drives a bunch of religious people into a black hole, but in the most boring way possible. It’s like “Poochie died on his way back to his home planet” but without the dignity.

I just realized I’ve written nearly 2000 words about the anime Glass Fleet and I have to go roll into my cave and die. Bye now


	3. series of picture edits from october 2015

## this scene still just absolutely fucking floors me

trigger warning: glass fleet (that means EVERYTHING)

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



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